WILL THESE MUSICIANS RETURN TO THE STAGE?
Will freelance musicians who found new passions return to performing?
America’s classical music organizations fell silent for a year, but many are in decent financial shape thanks to individual donors, foundations, administrative furloughs, salary cuts for musicians and federal funding like the Payment Protection Program.
While organizations such as the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and Pittsburgh Opera have come through in one piece, however, independent musicians at smaller regional orchestras and groups took the brunt of the impact. Smaller ensembles could not continue employing them through the pandemic.
“All of my performance income dried up just like that,” said trumpet player Micah Holt, a 33-year-old South Side resident who performs in several regional orchestras including the Erie Philharmonic and the West Virginia Symphony and teaches trumpet at Slippery Rock University.
The life of a contract musician follows the typical feast-or-famine patterns of the gig economy, so it isn’t unusual for these players to pick up side work. A few years ago, Holt began working part time at the climbing gym ASCEND in the South Side. As a route setter, he designs the paths up the climbing wall; the routes regularly shift and evolve to stay fresh and challenging for regular climbers.
“We’re like the chefs of the rock climbing gym,” Holt said.
During the pandemic, he increased his hours at the gym to offset lost performance income, sometimes working more than 20 hours a week there. He intends to keep or increase those hours while possibly cutting back on his trumpet gigs.
He isn’t alone. Dozens of musicians in the Pittsburgh area and around the country are either adjusting their careers to include more stable side hustles in the aftermath of the pandemic or hanging up their instruments for good.
David and Goliath
Independent musicians and the groups many work for are tiny compared to America’s largest orchestras, which have budgets of millions or tens of millions of dollars. Full-time, salaried musicians employed by such orchestras generally kept all or most of their salaries during the pandemic, agreeing to concessions as needed. In April 2020, musicians at the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and
some staff saw their base salaries cut 10%, then 20% in July and finally 25% for the 2020-21 season. Full base salary for musicians was $101,180.
Paul Austin, president of the International Conference of Symphony and Opera Musicians and a horn player with the Grand Rapids Symphony in Michigan, said industry experts were concerned about the financial fallout for arts groups, reminiscent of the 2008 economic downturn, in the beginning of the pandemic. Thebig losses did not materialize thanks to public and private support and drastically reduced costs; putting on concerts is the largestexpense most ensembles face.
“The difference between the pandemic and the economic downturn of 2008 was that in 2008 our donors took huge hits to their portfolios,” Austin said. “But that didn’t happen this time. I look at my retirement accounts every day and they don’t seem to be going down the tubes.”
Regional orchestras and opera companies, which generally employ singers and instrumentalists on a contract basis, were not able to continue paying their artists. Individuals felt the squeeze, although there was some relief. Many contract musicians applied for and received small
individual grants or loans or pandemic unemployment compensation.
Sebastian Vera, principal trombonist at Pittsburgh Opera and other regional ensembles, said that many of his colleagues received unemployment. “A lot of musicians were actually earning more on unemployment than they did typically.”
Vera, 38, teaches at both Slippery Rock and Duquesne universities, which helped offset lost performance income. He also threw himself into co-creating a podcast interviewing professional trombonists around the country about their careers. After one year, the popular podcast “The Trombone Retreat” has been downloaded more than 27,000 times in 80 countries.
Career intermission
Many independent musicians took on additional teaching responsibilities to boost their income, either privately or through university positions. Some produced and streamed house concerts, started podcasts or created other digital content, while others launched music-adjacent projects to bring in some money.
“I’m now in charge of a band of 12-year-olds,” said operatic soprano Leah de Gruyl, 37, a former resident artist at Pittsburgh Opera and rising star in the opera world. She’s currently based in West Virginia, where she teaches a girls rock camp.
De Gruyl was in the middle of rehearsals at Virginia Opera when everyone was sent home last year. She increased her teaching load to 20-25 students per week, lowering her usual rates to acknowledge the limitations of a Zoom lesson.
“I try to be a realist, not a pessimist,” she said. “But right now I don’t see a reality where I’d be able to subsist on singing alone.”
Local bass player Jesica Sharp Crewe, 37, had a side gig assisting with real estate transactions prior to the pandemic and began taking Alexander technique courses in the summer of 2020. The Alexander technique develops improved movement and posture and has grown popular as a form of physical therapy among musicians. It takes three years to become a certified teacher, and she sees the certification as “another piece of the puzzle” in her career portfolio.
Some orchestras continued to employ small numbers of musicians for streaming performances and recordings. Violist Maija Anstine, 32, said that she performed once every three or four weeks during the pandemic, masked and distanced in a small group of fellow players.
“I felt very lucky, but the weirdest thing about this was having to stand to receive applause when there was no one in the room,” she said. “It was dystopian.”
Anstine also works as a manager at Five Points Artisan Bake Shop in Squirrel Hill and significantly increased hours during the pandemic to make up for lost income. She said she’ll scale back as needed now that her gigs with local orchestras and ensembles are returning.
Curtains for now
Some musicians are cutting back on performing, either from economic pressure or discovering a new passion. Ian Evans, 40, of Peters, had a multi-decade career as a jazz drummer. He’s found a new outlet to satisfy his artistic cravings: growing and selling bonsai trees.
“I pretty much gigged right up until the pandemic, but then everything was just wiped out,” he recalled.
Evans began growing bonsai in 2018. In 2021, his wife created Bebop Bonsai to begin selling equipment and trees on consignment at local farmers markets and greenhouses like Chapon’s Greenhouse in Baldwin Borough. He aims to grow the business into a full-time endeavor.
“I see connections between bonsai and music,” Evans said. “I can improvise fluidly on the drums, and a bonsai tree presents similar challenges in that it’s a puzzle, like improvising within the bounds of what’s possible given the species of tree.”
He’s seeing increasing demand,which he attributes in part to the popular show “Cobra Kai.” In it, a grownup Daniel (the hero of the 1984 movie “Karate Kid”) hands out bonsai trees with car purchases from his dealership.
“It’s having a bit of a cultural moment,” he said. “There’s also a bit of a Bob Ross element …. Who doesn’t like a happy tree?”
Other musicians learned to code. Violinist Stefani Schore said that she knows many musicians who transitioned into coding due to the creativity involved. She decided to attend the Tech Elevator coding boot camp in December, graduated in April and walked into a fulltime position at PNC Bank a week later.
She intends to continue to play professionally, but having a stable full-time role will allow her to be more selective in choosing her opportunities, she said. Many freelancers feel pressure to say “yes” to every offer that comes their way due to financial pressures. Schore, who is engaged to Holt, recalled having rehearsals, performances and lessons in three different states in the same day.
“This isn’t a change of career, it’s a change of identity,”
she said. “My career aspiration was to be a fulltime musician and I achieved that, but I enjoy being in software development now.”
Violinist Juan Jamarillo, a Venezuelan native who performs with Pittsburgh’s opera and ballet orchestras, said he applied for many
pandemic assistance grants for individual musicians through organizations like the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council after performance opportunities dried up.
Then over a beer with a neighbor, Jamarillo stumbled into an opportunity with New York Life Insurance Co., focusing on retirement planning and investment protections. He became an agent in December and has expanded the company’s footprint with Pittsburgh’s Latin community.
“The income is definitely better than music. I must say. I’d been thinking about this for a while, and it was time to come to terms with reality.”
Jamarillo said he’ll continue to perform but anticipates cutting back.
“It’s disappointing not doing what I love to do full time, of course,” he said. “There are pros and cons, just like there are pros and cons in a musical career. I’m looking forward to seeing where this new opportunity takes me.”
Once a musician
Thanks to the pandemic, many musicians are rebalancing their career portfolios with nonmusical side hustles or even secondary careers. This isn’t new; it’s long been common for performing artists to work multiple jobs in different fields to make ends meet. But the pandemic has cast the instability of the field into sharp relief.
Some have chosen to walk away, especially after a taste of consistent income outside of music or even through unemployment compensation. Music schools continue to churn out more professionalmusicians than the current landscape can support. Perhaps the pandemic will begin balancing those scales.
Either way, the discipline and skill involved in becoming a professional musician readily translates to many other fields and endeavors.
“Classical musicians are not to be underestimated,” said Austin, the musician from Michigan. “You give us 15 months off work with no pay and we’ll find something to do. We’re resourceful people.”